KEZIA DAVIES TALKS TO ART AWARDS FINALIST ROMILY ALICE WALDEN
Tell us a bit about yourself and your practice
I’m a sculpture and installation artist based between England and Berlin. My work is concept led and primarily looks at contemporary embodiment and Post-Internet culture, asking questions about gendered heirarchies, sexual agency and the construction of the able body.
What made you decide to apply for this year’s Winter Pride Art Awards?
I was excited to apply for an Award that centres queer experience, it would be great to see more of that in the fine art world.
Why do you think it’s important that art is used to open up the discussion around LGBT+ issues and how do you think your practice interacts with these issues?
I think art can be a gateway into discourse and engaged conversation. There is the potential for art to allow someone to question their own internalised prejudice or social conditioning in a way that may be difficult if you tried to confront the issue directly through speech or text. Art gives people time to bypass defensiveness and make their own way through non-normative or marginalised issues; or even simply issues that they might not have considered before.
Can you tell us a little about the piece you’re exhibiting in reference to this year’s theme of ‘Beyond the Binaries’?
This piece comes from a series of work called ‘Always Turned On’ that I made in 2017. I was researching the links between digital culture and female identifying sexual agency. For these pieces I wanted to specifically talk to pornography and female identified porn consumption. This is still a widely undocumented topic, and so I wanted to use stills of masturbation from amateur pornography to create these very honest portraits of sexual desire and sexual agency amongst female identified people. The false binaries here are multiple and the work tries to expand and I suppose to move “beyond” some of the gendered expectations of digital and sexual culture to explore a more nuanced and complex reality.
Winter Pride Art Awards 